You Gave Your Love to Me Softly
by amethyst-kitten
Summary: A short piece about Ginny's unrequited love for Harry, and her reaction to it which involves sadness, anger, and a loss of self esteem.
1. Default Chapter

Ginny's bright brown eyes could be likened to tiger's eye, a thought that crossed her mind as she arranged dried flowers in vase made of blue glass. Bright brown waves of discontent pierced by daggers of silky amber spiderwebs. During these intermitently hot July days, these eyes were lately more often than not pointed toward the floor, like an inner purdah that was begging to be broken.  
  
"Ginger. Amelia. Weasley. " she recited to herself, twisting together stems of dead Black Eyed Susans. Perhaps it would grow on her. Sad, to think that one had to learn to like their own name. She had always imagined having a man speak it to her: whispering it perhaps, into her ear. At eighteen, she was too old to hold onto her fantasies, and yet already too jaded to hope for any more. Or at least she wished. Even now the knowlede that he was coming over shortly left tiny knives twisting into her heart, and this infuriated her.  
  
Dried roses were last, framing the bouquet in a kind of wilted exstacy. She set the bouquet on a acient oak table and turned on the radio. Muggle poprock blared into her tiny attic bedroom, competing with the gorgeous dappled sunlight comign in throught the stained glass window. She laid, listlessly, as a familliar song came on, one that she hated and loved all the same. It always brought out the same angsty feelings, feelings she would never know she shared with thousands of other teenagers, Muggle and magickfolk alike.  
  
"You gave your love to me softly  
  
I heard your heart beating true  
  
Still your Bijan lingers on and on and on  
  
You gave your love to me softly."  
  
Ginny traced the golden snitch embroidered onto her quilt, willing not to remember.  
  
"When I'm feeling blue and lonely  
  
All I have to do is think of you  
  
We had just one night but it lingers on and on and on  
  
You gave your love to me softly"  
  
She deliberately stared out of the window, caught between screaming in her anger and betrayal, and dissolving into tears at her rejection.  
  
"La, la, la" you sang to me  
  
"Baby don't you cry Put your arms around me child  
  
and lay with me tonight"  
  
"Ginny?" called a familiar tenor voice up the stairs. His voice.  
  
Ginny turned towards the wall, listening but not answering. 


	2. The Locket

"This is for you." Harry rasped, his voice shaking almost as much as the hands that extended hesitantly towards her.  
Ginny looked over his shoulder, into the sun. The sunset's blinding magenta left her tears swimming in prismatic rainbows, so much so that when she felt his beloved hand brush up against her sun-dappled cheek, she could almost have choked with emotion. But she didn't, because that's what he would have wanted.  
Harry hesitated, torn between running away and pulling her into his arms like a blanket. In desperation, he wrenched open her hands, depositing in them something that felt like feathery chains. Only when she still wouldn't look at him he made his retreat, kicking off on his Firebolt and disappearing beyond the advancing shadows.  
His touch lingered. Ginny savored it: The sublte lemon-oil scent of his skin, the gentle strokes of hands calloused thick from years of Quidditch. Out of one palm trailed the tarnished gold of a chain of whatever it was that he had left her.  
A locket? Ginny turned the delicate rose-shaped metal in her fingers, a fine 18th century gold-plated work of art turning brassy from years of women's adoring fingertips. Inscribed inside amidst a cascade of Ginny's own dried rosepetals were the words,  
  
Ginny, I need you, please, agree to see me. Tonight, at 8 by the lake.  
  
She stared, motionless. With a cry like a wounded animal she threw the locket, message and all, into the dust and stamped out Harry's yearnings with a simple twist of her dainty patent-leathered foot. "I know you're listening!" she bellowed to the encroaching darkness. Overhead, a flock of birds took flight. In a slightly more subdued tone she added, "I know you're listening, Harry Potter, and I want you to know that... I love you."  
Ginny abruptly stopped yelling, wiped her eyes, picked up the wobegone locket. She kissed it. "I love you, Harry Potter!" 


End file.
